The hardest times have come when he has been sitting at home alone or trying to get to sleep at night, with nothing to do but think. Travis Boak has scrolled through his phone a few times in the past few days, looking back over the text message conversations he and his old coach had.

There is no road map for tragedy on this scale. As one AFL club staffer said, all manner of scarcely imaginable scenarios are contemplated and planned for in AFL backrooms, but a coach dying from stab wounds in the middle of the night has never been one of them.